Welcome back to the show. It is fantastic to
have you with us for another deep dive. Yeah,
really glad you could join us today. Because
today, we are looking at a scenario that, well,
it almost defies belief. And I really want you
to put yourself in this headspace for a minute.
Right. Imagine a major military offensive where
Absolutely no ground is gained. Like zero tactical
advantage. A complete unmitigated failure on
the battlefield. Exactly. A total failure. And
yet somehow this localized disaster manages to
send shockwaves across the English Channel and
literally shake the very foundations of the British
government back home. Yeah, it's wild. How does
a muddy field in France bring down politicians
in London, right? Right. It is one of those cascading
chain reactions in history that you can you can
hardly believe actually happened. It really is
a local tactical failure that just snowballs
into a full -blown national political crisis.
So our mission for you today is to unpack exactly
how that happened by looking at the Battle of
Auburs, which is also known as the Battle of
Auburs Ridge. Yeah. This was an infamous British
offensive on the Western Front during World War
I, taking place on May 9th, 1915. And our source
material for this deep dive is a really comprehensive
Wikipedia article. Covers everything. It does.
It details the battle, the prelude, the specifics.
military tactics used by both sides, and of course,
that monumental aftermath we just teased. To
really understand the sheer scale of what went
wrong here, we first have to set the stage. Because
this battle, it didn't just happen in a vacuum.
No, it was part of something much bigger. Exactly.
It was the initial British contribution to a
much larger combined Franco -British offensive
known as the Second Battle of Artois. Right.
The French commander in chief at the time, Joseph
Joffrey, was planning this massive push. He had
the French 10th Army tasked with attacking the
German 6th Army north of Eris. And their immediate
goal was to capture the heights at Notre Dame
de Lorette and Vimy Ridge. Yes. But Joffrey needed
help to actually pull this off. Right. He essentially
goes to Sir John French, who is the commander
of the British Expeditionary Force, and asks
if the British can support this massive French
offensive. basically trying to widen the gap
in the German defenses. Yeah. And French agrees.
The British First Army was positioned further
north along the line, so they decided to launch
their supporting attack in the southern half
of their front. Near a village called Leventi.
Exactly. Yeah. And the ultimate prize they were
eyeing for this specific operation was Auburs
Ridge. Which honestly, calling it a ridge might
give you the wrong impression. Yeah, it definitely
sounds grander than it is. Right. If you're picturing
steep cliffs or rocky drop -offs, forget it.
We're talking about an area just two to three
kilometers away from the British lines that was
only slightly elevated above the surrounding
landscape. I mean, in any normal context, it
is barely even a hill. Yeah. But you have to
picture the terrain in this specific part of
France. It was incredibly flat and notoriously
poorly drained. Basically a swamp. It is essentially
a miserable waterlogged expanse of mud. So in
an environment like that, even a slight elevation
gives you a massive tactical advantage. For artillery
observation, just keeping your own troops dry.
Right, precisely. And that slight elevation,
Auburs Ridge, contained the villages of Auburs,
Fromelle, and Lemaisnil. And what makes this
upcoming battle even more grim to think about
is that the British had just fought over this
exact same area two months prior. Right, during
the Battle of Neufchappel. Yeah. They knew the
mud. They knew the misery. And that Previous
battle is the key to everything that follows.
It dictated exactly how the Germans prepared
for this new attack. Right. But before we get
to the German defenses, we really should look
at the British battle plan because they brought
some incredibly modern multi -domain tactics
to the table for robbers. They really did. Which
brings us to the subterranean warfare. Yeah,
this is fascinating. The British deployed the
173rd Tunneling Company. And the source notes
this was only the second time specialist royal
engineer tunneling companies were used in this
specific way. They literally tunneled right under
no man's land, you know, that deadly stretch
of empty ground between the two opposing armies.
Right. They planted explosive mines directly
beneath the German defenses, and these mines
were set to be blown at zero hour. The exact
moment the infantry attack began. Exactly. I
mean, imagine the claustrophobia and the sheer
nerve it takes to dig silently underground. In
the freezing mud, knowing the enemy is right
above your head. It's terrifying. It really is.
And while those engineers were working in the
dark below the earth, the British were also taking
to the sky above. Right, the air support. Yeah,
air support was a huge component of this plan.
It's so easy to forget how new aviation was in
early 1915. But they were deeply involved. Three
squadrons of the first Wing Royal Flying Corps
were attached to the first army for this operation.
And they were busy before the battle even started.
Yeah. For four straight days leading up to the
attack, these squadrons flew continuous defensive
patrols. Just acting as a shield in the sky.
Right. Their entire job was to deter enemy reconnaissance
planes from seeing the troop buildups. Then during
the battle itself, their mission shifted. They
were tasked with artillery observation. Literally
spotting where the shells were landing and signaling
back. Exactly. Yeah. As well as bombing German
rear areas, railway junctions, and bridges further
afield. They were actively trying to blind the
German command and choke off their supply lines.
So on paper, it is a brilliant concept. You've
got tunnels detonating below, airplanes bombing
above, and infantry charging the middle. It sounds
unstoppable. OK, let's unpack this. Because despite
all of that innovative planning, the Germans
were not just sitting around waiting to be attacked.
Garf on it. They had spent the last two months
turning the earth itself into a meat grinder.
Yeah. The lessons of that previous battle at
Neuf -Chapelle completely shifted German military
doctrine in this sector. Right. They learned
a very hard lesson two months earlier. They realized
a single line of breastworks was nowhere near
enough to stop a determined attack. Let's pause
and define that for a second, because breastworks
is a term that gets thrown around a lot in World
War I history. It does. Why build a breastwork
instead of digging a trench? It goes back to
that poorly drained terrain we mentioned. If
you try to dig a traditional trench in Laventie,
you hit the water table almost immediately. Right,
you're essentially digging a canal. Exactly.
And your soldiers will drown or freeze in the
water. So instead of digging down into the earth,
you have to build walls up above the ground.
Using sandbags, timber, earth, that kind of thing.
Right. Those built up walls are breastworks.
And the Germans realized their old breastworks
were too flimsy. Yeah. This is a terrifying aha
moment for anyone studying military adaptation.
They didn't just rebuild the walls, they engineered
an impenetrable fortress. Absolutely. To start,
the barbed wire entanglements sitting out in
no man's land weren't just repaired. The wire
was doubled, and in some places, trebled. And
as for the breastworks themselves, the old ones
used to be about five feet deep. The Germans
expanded them to a massive 15 to 20 feet broad.
We are talking about muddy walls as thick as
a house. They also added something called a piratos.
What's that? It's a thick bank of earth built
up behind the trench line. That protects the
soldiers from the shrapnel of shells exploding
to their rear. But the machine gun placement
is the detail that absolutely chills me. Oh,
yeah. Rather than just pointing them forward
to shoot at the charting British, the source
details how each battalion had two machine guns
and placed right at ground level. Yes. Explicitly
set to sweep no man's land from the flanks. Wait,
so if you're a British soldier charging forward,
the fire isn't just coming at your face. It's
crossing your path from the sides. Exactly. It
creates an interlocking field of crossfire. There
is literally no way to hide. If you drop to the
ground, the bullets are skimming just above the
mud. And that nightmare was just their first
line of defense. Right. Moving about 200 yards
behind that massive front breast work, the Germans
built a completely new structure called the Vongraben.
Which translates to a living trench, essentially.
Exactly that. This wasn't a fighting position.
It was a survival bunker. It featured deep dugouts
underneath the earth that could comfortably accommodate
20 to 30 men each. Wow. And the von Grauben was
connected to the front line by solidly built
communication trenches that were fully equipped
with concrete shelters. So the front line changed
completely. Right. Because of this, the front
line essentially became nothing more than a line
of sentry posts. The main garrison lived safely
200 yards back in the von Grauben, completely
shielded from the initial bombardment. ready
to rush forward through those concrete communication
trenches the moment an attack started. Exactly.
So even if the British somehow survived the double
barbed wire, the flanking machine guns, and managed
to climb over a 20 -foot broad wall of earth,
they would immediately hit a fully rested, heavily
protected second wave of infantry pouring out
of the communication trenches. Unbelievable.
And it gets even deeper than that. About 700
to a thousand yards back from the front line,
the Germans constructed the Stutzpunklinie. Hold
on, how far back are we talking now? Because
it sounds like they are building an entire underground
city out there. Over half a mile behind the front
lines. The Stutzpunklinie was a line of dedicated
reinforced concrete machine gun posts spaced
out evenly about a thousand yards apart at strategic
locations. Wait. The text specifically names
places like La Terelle, Ferme du Bois, and Ferme
Cours d 'Evoi. These were designed as absolute
rallying points. So a fallback position. Yes.
If the British managed to overrun the front lines
and the Vongraben, the surviving German infantry
would fall back to these concrete bunkers and
hold the line. Effectively trapping the British
in a new deeper crossfire. Exactly. It is defense
in depth taken to its absolute extreme. And we
haven't even mentioned the German artillery yet.
Right. The German command placed most of their
field artillery. These are batteries of four
guns each alongside heavier artillery batteries
between 2 ,500 and 4 ,000 yards back. Sitting
securely up on Auburs Ridge itself. And just
to show you how thoroughly they planned for worst
-case scenarios, the Germans had already built
a second line of gun positions even further back
than that. Wow. If the British miraculously broke
through the bunkers, the German artillery could
simply hitch up their guns, retreat to pre -dug
positions, and immediately start supporting a
counterattack. And every single German battalion
frontage, which was held by about 280 men, had
support companies waiting 2 ,000 yards back and
reserve companies another 2 ,000 to 4 ,000 yards
behind them. The strategic depth meant the British
were essentially attacking a brick wall with
a hammer. But behind that brick wall were five
more brick walls, each thicker than the last.
Here's where it gets really interesting and frankly
incredibly tragic. Because against this absolute
master class in defensive engineering, the British
attack completely utterly fell apart. The source
material refers to it as an unmitigated disaster.
And the failures were entirely systemic. It wasn't
just one lucky break for the Germans. No, it
wasn't one unlucky break for the British either.
It was a cascading failure of intelligence, logistics,
and firepower all overlapping at once. Let's
start with the intelligence failure. How could
the British not know about these defenses? That's
the big question. The records show they either
didn't have the reconnaissance information about
these massive concrete reinforced German upgrades,
Or they had the intel sitting on a desk somewhere
and simply didn't give it enough weight. Yeah.
They were ordering tens of thousands of men to
attack a fortress they seemingly didn't know
existed. And because they lacked that intelligence,
they lost the element of surprise entirely. Right.
The opening bombardment, the massive artillery
barrage that is supposed to blow apart the barbed
wire and smash the breastworks so the infantry
can actually run across. No man's land. It failed
on almost every level. It just wasn't enough.
Nowhere near powerful enough to break the troubled
wire. It barely scratched the 20 foot broad breastworks.
And crucially, it completely failed to knock
out those flanking machine guns and placed at
ground level. And the logistics behind the British
lines were just as disastrous. The trench layout
and the traffic flow systems were so poorly organized
that when the attack started and things immediately
went wrong, it caused a catastrophic A total
gridlock. Yes. They couldn't efficiently move
fresh reinforcements forward through the narrow
communication trenches. And even more devastatingly,
they couldn't evacuate the massive influx of
casualties backward. It was essentially a traffic
jam of human suffering. What really sealed their
fate, however, was a severe and fatal problem
with their ammunition. This is a huge factor.
The British artillery was in terrible condition.
The guns themselves were heavily overused. Right.
When an artillery barrel gets worn down from
firing too many shells, it loses its rifling
and becomes wildly inaccurate. It just sprays
everywhere. Exactly. And to make matters worse,
it wasn't just the gun barrels causing issues.
The ammunition itself was failing due to poor,
rushed manufacturing back in the factories. So
you have worn -out guns firing defective shells
at fortifications that are four times thicker
than you thought they were. It is a recipe for
a massacre. And as soon as the infantry charged,
the battlefield quickly dissolved into thick
smoke, mud, and total chaos. Yeah. It became
impossible for the artillery spotters to tell
where the British troops even were. Accurate
artillery support became a physical impossibility.
Because if the British gunners fired, they were
just as likely to drop those defective shells
on their own men who were pinned down in the
mud of No Man's Land. The result of all these
compounding systemic failures is a disparity
in casualties that is just staggering to read.
It really is. We are talking about a 10 to 1
casualty ratio. On May 9 alone, the British official
historian James Edmonds recorded 11 ,619 British
casualties. Hope for 11 ,000. Over 11 ,000 men
killed, wounded, or missing in a matter of hours.
And looking at the other side of No Man's Land,
The German regiments defending that specific
sector, infantry regiments 55 and 57, recorded
roughly 900 casualties total. 11 ,000 to 900,
it is a slaughter. But within that horrifying
statistic, the source material gives us these
profound, deeply human flashes of individual
heroism. Those moments really stand out. There
is this incredibly vivid detail of the Royal
Munster Fusiliers. Right before the battle, perhaps
knowing the absolute hell they were about to
walk into, the entire battalion received absolution
from their chaplain, Father Francis Gleason.
Wow. You can just picture that scene. Hundreds
of men kneeling in the muddy, claustrophobic
trenches, the quiet tension in the air before
the whistles blow. The psychological weight those
men were carrying is unimaginable. They had to
know, looking at the wire and the defenses, the
odds were entirely against them. And despite
the tactical failure of the overarching plan,
The individual bravery shown that day was astounding.
The source lists four specific men who earned
the Victoria Cross. Which is the absolute highest
award for gallantry in the British Armed Forces.
Yes. Four men earned it on that single day at
Auburs. David Finley and John Ripley from the
Blackwatch Royal Highlanders, Charles Sharp of
the Royal Lincolnshire Regiment, and James Upton
of the Sherwood Foresters. What's fascinating
here is that despite that incredible courage,
despite the tunneling engineers under the earth,
the air support flying overhead and the men earning
Victoria crosses in the mud, the attack achieved
absolutely nothing strategically. Nothing at
all. Not a single inch of ground was won. And
as for the whole reason they attacked in the
first place to support Joffrey and the French
10th Army fighting 15 miles to the south, historians
highly doubt the Battle of Auburs had even the
slightest positive effect on that main French
offensive. So what does this all mean? We have
over 11 ,000 casualties for zero game. Usually
a localized defeat like this stays a military
matter buried in reports and official histories.
Right. But this is the exact moment where the
story jumps from the blood -soaked mud of France
straight into the civilian halls of power in
London. This is where the political shockwaves
begin to tear through Britain. Shortly after
the utter failure at Alvors Ridge, a war correspondent
working for the Times newspaper named Colonel
Charles Court -Reppington set a highly sensitive
telegram back to London. And Reppington wasn't
just observing from afar or guessing about what
went wrong with the artillery. He was writing
this dispatch using information supplied directly
by the British commander himself, Sir John French.
Which is wild to think about. Right. The commander
of the entire military force is essentially bypassing
his own government and leaking the root cause
of his army's failure directly to a journalist.
Exactly. And that specific leak leads to a headline
in the Times on May 14th, 1915 that literally
changed history. I'll quote it exactly as it
appeared. Roll for it. Need for shells. British
attacks checked. Limited supply the cause. A
lesson from France. If we connect this to the
bigger picture, you can begin to see how explosive
this was for the British public. The highest
level of the military is openly pointing the
finger at the politicians and the factory owners
back home. Broadcasting to the entire nation,
your sons are dying in the mud because you aren't
manufacturing the right equipment. This single
article, sparked directly by the artillery failures
at the Battle of Auburs, precipitated a massive
national scandal that became known as the Shell
Crisis of 1915. The public outrage was immediate
and ferocious. People were reading over their
morning tea that their army was being slaughtered
because of faulty manufacturing and a lack of
ammunition. Yeah. It is incredible to trace the
line. A local tactical failure caused by bad
shells and worn out gun barrels fundamentally
rocked the British government. It really did.
It brought down the ruling liberal government
of Prime Minister H .H. Asquith and forced the
immediate creation of a new coalition government.
Just from this one battle. Yes. And to solve
the problem, they had to create a brand new Ministry
of Munitions headed by David Lloyd George. The
failure to take a tiny elevated ridge in France
literally reshaped how the entire British Empire
ran its war economy. It perfectly illustrates
the brutal reality of industrialized war. The
frontline trenches and the civilian home front
are inextricably linked. You really are. The
soldiers can only fight with the tools the factories
produce. When the factories fail to deliver quality
ammunition, the soldiers die in staggering numbers.
And when the public finds out, the governments
fall. It is a really heavy realization. Just
to recap the intense journey we've been on with
you today. Yeah, we've covered a lot. We started
with a high stakes multi -domain battle plan
featuring subterranean tunneling engineers and
some of the earliest military air support in
history. Right. We explored a German defensive
masterclass that turned the high water table
into an excuse to build a fortress of 20 foot
broad earthworks and interlocking machine gun
fire. A literal underground city. We broke down
the tragic compounding failures of British intelligence,
logistics and faulty artillery that led to a
horrifying 10 to one casualty ratio. Yeah. And
finally, we saw how that localized disaster at
Auburs leaked into the civilian press and caused
a political earthquake back in London, birthing
the Shell crisis of 1915. It is a tremendous
amount of historical gravity to take in, but
it perfectly encapsulates the incredibly steep
brutal learning curve that all armies faced in
1915. Absolutely. They were applying 19th century
tactics to 20th century killing machines and
the cost was paid in human lives. It really was.
And as we wrap up our time with you today we
want to leave you with one final provocative
thought. Okay. We have spent this entire deep
dive focused intensely on the Battle of Auburs,
where the British suffered those 11 ,000 plus
casualties in a matter of days for absolutely
no ground gained. Right. But remember how we
set the stage at the very beginning. Auburs was
just one small supporting piece of the broader
Second Battle of Artois. It was essentially the
opening act for the massive French offensive
ordered by Joffre. Exactly. And according to
the statistics provided by the official history
editor Hans von Haften, the broader operations
of that overarching second Battle d 'Artois resulted
in roughly 102 ,500 French casualties, 32 ,000
British casualties, and over 73 ,000 German casualties.
This raises an important question. It certainly
does. We want you to consider the sheer, almost
incomprehensible scale of this conflict as a
whole. Yeah. If a quote unquote small piece of
the puzzle like oberfabers, a localized battle
that lasted just days and gained absolutely nothing,
could cause a nationwide political crisis over
ammunition. Right. What does that staggering
total of over 200 ,000 casualties across the
whole Artois offensive tell us? What does that
say about the terrifying new reality of industrial
warfare that the world had just blindly entered
into? It represents a scale of mass destruction
and logistical consumption that neither the systems
of government nor the human mind were truly equipped
to process at the time. Something to ponder as
you go about the rest of your day. We want to
thank you so much for joining us on this deep
dive. Thanks for listening. Keep questioning
the history you think you know and keep exploring.
We will catch you next time.